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Was the pleasure of writing code that the author describes tied to the actual practice or its profits?

My impression is that many white collar workers felt that their jobs and accompanying status were immutable. They’re not. Couldn’t they have seen this coming?

Nothing prevents people from continuing on with their trades or interests how they did before the AI bubble bloomed. But if they want to earn a living doing it, I guess they need to start thinking outside of the box. I believe prolonged contact with insulation induces hive breakout.

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I'm not sure we are built for this on a societal scale. I understand the reasoning rationally. Sure, nobody pitied the horseshoe-maker blacksmith who was proud of his craft when the car was invented. Or the tailors when clothing became cheaply mass-produced. Or even the miners after many mines closed. Yeah I get it. "You learned a craft and it's no longer needed. Sucks to suck. Try to be useful in some other way or get bent."

Having to reinvent your career when you are 30+/40+/50+ is not so simple. You studied something, amassed experience and tacit knowledge, taste and work habits.

It used to be the case that you learned as an apprentice (or simply grew up on a farm and saw the work) and then continued it the rest of your life.

We will be more and more efficient at pumping more wealth to the owner classes, but people will be spiritually ground down.

The loss of self that comes with being effectively severed from society through labor exclusion is…a radical process.

I read in a book titled The Technology Trap about how in the past, rulers withheld technological advancements and gave strategic deference to the people whose labor would be most affected by them, so as it not put their own necks at risk.

That doesn’t seem to be a concern today.

The AI debacle is unusual as it's alive in disinformation at a scale that penetrates every status class.

Of course AI is a failure of imagination. But so were symbols, which cannot reference, they can only represent, if at all.

The real function of AI appears to be the transition away from symbols, metaphors, folk science cause and effect ideation.

We're only barely sensing this, but if you listen to Gary Marcus, Rich Sutton and those willing to see the larger scales, they are bellwethers that are actually sinking their own approaches as well as LLMs.

In effect, labor is about to reap the benefits of the AI debacle. I see this in the AI at the major teaching hospital my sister is a department head of. In lead developers in gaming, in media. AI does not function well, it's essentially wax fruit, it's not even mimicry. That's going to lead to an analog rebirth.

Curious what your take on this piece might be. I recommend the last 1/3 of it if you’re pressed for time or wits.

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/lessons-of-babel/articles/...

I found it a bit pretentious and name-dropping more than having a cogent point. AI is not simply going to take jobs where you just have to blabber stochastically. It can execute commands, call tools, write code etc. I think the author got caught up too much in the fact that the "Word" in the Gospel of John seems to align with the fact that LLMs process words. But it's really not a very deep connection.

The input is arbitrary so claiming it can execute perpetually any of these is still trapped behind re arbitrary lens or threshold.

Thanks for sending, I read it all. I think it keeps its feet in two incompatible realms. Ultimately LLMs turn us into wax fruit, not stochastic parrots.

The word is an arbitrary form, as myth is, (as symbols, money, news, states/politics) both are ultimately evolutionarily suspect in terms of animal signals, and we haven't found a specific workaround to that arbitrariness. That's extinction. The world is only specific, as is survival.

I suggest the only function of arbitrary signals is to refute themselves into replacement. The good thing about the AI debacle is that it's about speeding that up.

That is not how people work, especially if they want to do good work. You need to imbue your career with a little bit of your identity, a little bit of your soul. Coding, auto-repair, horse-rearing, plumbing, accountancy, what have you.

You do well to limit this somewhat. But it is inevitable, if you want to achieve anything. You are going to end up smelling somewhat like your work clothes, no matter your industry, no matter the year.

We can't all have the mission statement "to make money", if the machines of money-making are to function. You would never have the nevessary skills that way.

Not saying that we do well to spend the next 30 years griping, we don't. But don't shame people from being hurt by the whims of business. People need to grieve lost stuff, goes for AI, goes for "auto plant went out of business", goes for anything.

Online people have this redditism that it's some American weirdness that people "live to work", while in Europe people "work to live" and stretch this too far. People (especially men) throughout the ages and regions have seen their work as a critical component of their identity, whether it be a craft or farming. The honor in completing the day's work, being valued for having a skill, honing that skill over the years, etc. It's not by itself a symptom of a workaholic. This can leave space for family and friends and neighbors too. But the idea that your job is supposed to be purely superficial is way overblown. It's a symptom of the generic alienated work that is full of useless meetings and business-buzzword-bingo-lingo and you can't coherently formulate in words to an outsider what even that job is, or how it concretely contributes to the betterment of the community/world/people (aka bullshit job).

I reckon that shame was once an effective method of communal correction and accountability. But it wasn’t my intent to affect it.

So no, I agree, don’t shame people for being hurt by the whims of business. But I would say, encourage the newcomers to this experience (who I suspect are exceptional in their sociopolitical status compared to their predecessors) to re-envision themselves and the ways that they render their service beyond prior cushiony contexts.

Businesses may not need you, you may make much less than before. But society sorely does need you in some capacity and the unfortunate case is that, to be frank, not too many people are going to be quick to boo-hoo with you over your loss because they’ve gone through something like it before already. Them or a loved one.

This is an American phenomenon. Join and be of aid to your countrymen. But don’t get SaaSy.

In all honesty I value my craft and doing things without AI and id have much less of an issue with LLMs if people were more understanding of their capabilities and limitations. The tech environment is pushing AI into everything because its a fancy buzz word that's used to increase corporate share value.

Personally I am pretty conflicted about using it considering its built upon theft and cheap labor. Making money isn't that nice if its unethical, and id keep that out of my company for as long as possible.

I went through something like that transition the first time I moved into management.

It took me by surprise how much I tied what I did to who I was, and how much it bothered me that I could no longer so easily articulate what I'd done during a day at work. It was no longer I made this, I made that, I added these features, I fixed those bugs. It was all relational. It was all meetings and conversations. It felt like anyone could be doing it. So I felt like I had no value. Like I was a spare wheel. Three or four years and in all that time I never made my peace with it.

So burned out and dejected[0] I went back to software development and performance consulting. I did that for about 3 years.

The second time I went into management was different. Maybe I was just older. Maybe I'd done a bit more reading and thinking about management and leadership. I certainly knew what I liked and disliked, and what I admired in other leaders. Because of the consulting I'd seen a variety of leaders at work in lots of different contexts, with different challenges, different styles, and different personalities. At any rate, I had a different and broader view of what good looked like.

I also had a clear and strong remit and room to operate: build a new product, build and lead a new team, open an office, rearchitect and rebuild our platform, become CTO.

But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).

This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.

In my case that took for-fucking-ever - I've always been something of a late developer[1] - and many people reading this have and will adapt much more quickly. I'll say this: it's much easier to let go when you have a stronger idea of what "next" looks like[2], so figure out what that is. Software development is changing, for all of us, and even now nobody really knows what that means, but it doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the more extreme viewpoints published online regarding AI and software development are no better than noise: they're just clickbait designed to generate reaction and engagement. Their real informational value is close to zero.

That is obviously not the case with this piece, which describes the author's personal experience in our new AI enabled world.

And I get their point about the craft. You really do feel that. But what you have to realise is the craft doesn't go away: it moves to a different level of abstraction. What can you (what can we) do now that you couldn't do before? What do the wrinkles and contours of that, where your (our) finesse will be needed, actually look like?

This all reads more like a pile of scattered thoughts than I'd intended, but hopefully there's some value in there for some of you.

[0] Not just for these reasons: there were other things - including one or two other major contributors - going on that I don't want to talk about here, but my lack of comfort with the nature of my role was certainly a somewhat chunky factor. Just don't overread or assume too much from what I'm saying.

[1] No pun intended - nobody should read anything delivery related into this comment.

[2] This touches on some of those issues I didn't want to talk about. Within that organisational context I'd reached a ceiling and no-one, including me, was grown up enough to be real about that. So I kept trying to push on and break through and, well, I guess we all wasted a lot of eachother's time although, from my side, I don't feel too bad about it.

These passages, right here:

> But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).

> This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.

> Represent the perspectives I was hoping to invite with my comment. The paragraph immediately following these was equally great.

I’ve read a lot of interesting remarks about people who’ve gone back and forth between programming and management positions in tech and I can relate to the experience in some ways.

What you and the author are describing is legitimate. And I think that your experience occurring while making an apparent step forward in your profession (as opposed to the step backwards that AI imposes) indicates something…special about man, his craft and its relation to himself and his perceived value to others (or lack thereof) while practicing his craft.

I think this is a common thing, generally speaking. On one end, there are plenty of people in other (less-paying, less-appealing) industries who have gone through these kind of experiences—past and present—so it’s easy for someone like me to feel apathetic in this case.

For better or worse it’s a privilege that there are some people who are able to articulate their particular circumstances, under a shared shade.

I guess this is the point where the Marxists begin to revel in the bourgeois gaining “class consciousness”. I haven’t checked on all the literature to be sure how that often turns out in history.

> (as opposed to the step backwards that AI imposes)

I guess this is my only quibble: is it really a step backwards? I can get on board with the idea that maybe the jury is out, but the evidence I've seen and experienced is more that it's a force multiplier than anything else.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're all fucked.

But for now at least I think reports of the death of software development as a profession are greatly exaggerated.

Good point. I wish I would’ve added a condition to that statement. Dexterity varies. I don’t think that the profession as whole is doomed and I’m skeptical toward the expectation that other skilled/craft industries are as well.

I think that AI is going to be a boon for certain types of people, an impediment for some others and a source of indifference for some too. But I don’t necessarily expect the median to go quietly out the door. Unless they receive a universal, perpetual sort of “severance” with a progressive-sounding tint.

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